Female Sexual Strategy Archetypes

Graph 14: Female sexual strategy archetypes

This taxonomy describes women’s dating behavior through a market metaphor. Its categories and pop-culture examples reflect the author’s interpretations of attraction, care, status, and control. The text does not provide evidence that the labels reliably identify an individual’s motives.

The Anti-Girl rejects one or more aspects of typical feminine traits in order to create a new strategy, one that allows her to differentiate herself from the pack. The Anti-chick strategies seek to manipulate the perception of beauty and scarcity in order to target a specific demographic. The "Cool chick" on the other hand seeks to manipulate the male performance burden, and investment costs to target another demographic.

The categories can overlap. Within this framework, a person may combine strategies or move between them over time.

Ultra-Girl Strategies

The Ultra Girl strategies emphasize traits the author regards as feminine to appeal to particular groups of men. The Beauties attempt to attract men with a strong sensory focus, through their appearance or sexuality. The Mother Hens seek to attract men who would like to be taken care of in some fashion, spiritually, physically or emotionally. The Nurturers in this category focus on spirituality and/or physical care taking, while the Hausfraus seek out men with emotional damage that can be dominated.

The Beauty based strategies

The beauty strategies are focused around appearance. They differ in how they present the effort behind their appearance. The Fashionista's statement is "Do you think this just happens?" when asked about her looks, whereas the Natural Beauty acts as if she simply rolled out of bed that way.

The Fashionista

Archetype: The Ultra-Girl

Category: The Girly Girl

Main focus: Appearance, beauty, glamour and style

Pop Culture Example: Cher from Clueless

The fashionista invests heavily in fashion, make-up, hair, and appearance. Where the natural beauty often shies away from excessive make-up, opting for a girl-next-door look, the fashionista knows what makes her look good and will get it. The major strategic goal for her is to land the same type of man who buys expensive sports cars, large mansions and other status symbols. The model casts her as a status symbol who understands that role.

This archetype relies on the Halo Effect and Scarcity. She is portrayed as seeking a high investment from a partner while presenting herself as rare and worth the cost.

The Natural Beauty (The Girl next door)

Archetype: The Ultra-Girl

Category: The Girly Girl

Main focus: Appearance, natural beauty, wholesome.

Pop Culture Example: Jessica Biel

The major difference between the fashionista and the natural beauty is that the former is highly fashion focused, whereas the latter appears attractive by accident. Often seen in clothing that gives the appearance of simplicity and very little thought, the plan here is to appear just as attractive as the fashionista, yet as a much better deal. This variant is often combined with nurturer characteristics in order to appear as traditional wife material or with traits from "The Guys Girl" or "The Low Investment Chick"

This variant is focused on male archetypes that are looking for traditional relationships. Where the fashionista is focused on the high fliers among men through becoming the perfect trophy wife, the Natural beauty is often focused on successful and high status males. The author interprets "The Natural Beauty" through neglect of probability: a partner may assume her appearance takes little work. In the article’s illustration, she gets up 3 hours earlier to create her "natural" look.

The Agent Provocateur strategies

The Provocateur strategies are based around exaggerating either sexuality in the case of "Sexual Girl" or ambition in the case of "Career Girl". The former promises physical pleasure; the latter offers to share the demands of achievement.

"Career girl"

Archetype: The Ultra-Girl

Category: Agent Provocateur

Main focus: Appearance, competition, accomplishment

Pop Culture Example: Miranda from "The Devil Wears Prada"

"The career girl" strategy can be described as the "Bitch in heels" strategy. While often retaining large amounts of femininity in her appearance, her attitude rejects traditional feminine submissive qualities, in favor of competition, accomplishment and being very goal oriented. This is Patrick Bateman taking your face off while wearing a pencil-skirt and a $600 haircut.

The author portrays this archetype as wanting a partner who puts her career first, possibly becoming a stay-at-home father. The portrait also assumes she may postpone motherhood until after 35. Those motives and life choices are part of this characterization; ambition alone does not establish them.

This is often seen as a combination strategy with "The Pusher" or "The Guilter", but especially early in their lives, they may adopt traits of "The Low Investment Chick".

"Sexual girl"

Archetype: The Ultra-Girl

Category: Agent Provocateur

Main focus: Sexual forwardness, submissiveness, indirect manipulation,

Pop Culture Example: Lolita from "Lolita"

The Sexual girl often comes in two variants, depending on her preference for cunning. In this portrayal, sex becomes a means of influence. Their goal is to overwhelm your senses completely by catering exactly to your fantasies whatever they may be, thus creating a bond and planting the thought "I will never get sex like this ever again."

The author casts Marilyn Monroe’s public persona as combining this archetype with "Fashionista" and "The Pusher" traits, pointing to her dress, body language, and speech.

The model describes this as a strategy with broad appeal, especially to men it characterizes as sensation-seeking or high in Dark Triad traits. It also associates the archetype with affairs involving apparently "stable and trustworthy" men. The text offers no basis for estimating how common that pattern is.

The Mother Hen (caretaking and nurturing strategies)

The Mother Hen category centers on nurturing. The model distinguishes Nurturers, for whom care is an end in itself, from the Hausfrau variants, who are portrayed as using care to gain control.

The Nurturer Strategies

The Nurturers come in two major variants, "The Mom" and "The Muse". The former focuses on physical and emotional care taking, in a more traditional nurturer role, whereas the latter is highly focused on creative and/or spiritual nurturing. This is why "Mom" types are often found in traditional relationships while The Muse is often found in relationships with creative types such as musicians and artists.

"The Mom"

Archetype: The Ultra-Girl

Category: The Nurturer

Main focus: Caretaking, nurturing, traditional wife.

Pop Culture Example: Carol Brady

The Nurturer competes through being a very efficient and competent caretaker; when someone says, "She will make a great mom" this is the variant about which one is speaking. The model presents this type as a desirable partner because she provides care and support. This is the girl that shows up to your house with homemade soup if you cancel your date because you're sick, who cleans your place and makes breakfast after staying over.

Their major focus in life is taking care of their loved ones, and they may appear co-dependent in some cases. The strategy may be combined with "The Natural Beauty", or make a transition into "The Pusher" or "The Guilter" later in life. If faced with a divorce, or early death of a partner, they will often transition into a more overt strategy such as Sexual Girl, in an attempt to get their groove back.

"The Muse"

Archetype: The Ultra-Girl

Category: The Nurturer

Main focus: Caretaking, inspiration, encouraging ambition

Pop Culture Example: Faith from "Californication"

The Muse strategy differs from "The Nurturer" by emphasizing encouragement and inspiration rather than physical care. This strategy often targets a demographic consisting of artistic men, such as musicians, painters and other artists, but it may also on occasion target what is seen as artistic ability in other fields.

This strategy is often combined with "The New Age Chick" or "Career Girl" where in the case of the former, it will focus very strongly on her man's spiritual and creative needs, while in the latter she may very well find herself supporting her 38 year old boyfriend who is in a band "and are about to make it man". If the combination has the trifecta of a primary Muse strategy, supported by "Career girl" and "The Nurturer" she may find herself very prone to being taken advantage of by high Dark Triad men.

The combination of "The Muse" with "Sexual Girl" and "The New Age Chick" is often kryptonite to a large male demographic, especially the type of man who has spent his entire life "doing the right thing" and being a stable and reliable person.

The Hausfrau strategies

The model uses Hausfrau for a controlling version of the nurturer: apparent care masks an attempt to make a partner follow a script. A typical example that you frequently can observe is a Career Girl or Fashionista that transitions into a pusher or guilter when her man fails to live up to what she perceives as his potential.

"The Pusher"

Archetype: The Ultra-Girl

Category: The Hausfrau

Main focus: Caretaking, nagging, pushing

Pop Culture Example: Lois from "Malcolm in the Middle", Kathy Bates in "Misery".

The Pusher is often a transitional strategy that a woman adopts after having locked a man down. If you look at a typical "Hen-pecked" husband, odds are his wife is a pusher. The Pusher is often a "Nurturer" that has suffered some setbacks and is no longer feeling content with her life, and therefore she attempts to change what she does not like through direct conflict.

Rather than being a distinct sexual strategy to get a man, "The Pusher" is a transition from another female sexual strategy used to "get a man", to one where her man is used as a means to an end. The transition from the original sexual strategy to "The Pusher" often results in the man either ending the relationship or becoming the stereotypical doormat.

"The Guilter"

Archetype: The Ultra-Girl

Category: The Hausfrau

Main focus: Caretaking, manipulation, guilt trips.

Pop Culture Example: Debra and Marie from "Everybody loves Raymond".

The distinction between "The Guilter" and "The Pusher" is a preference for indirect or direct conflict. While "The Pusher" is very comfortable utilizing direct nagging and browbeating to punish behavior and correct her family, "The Guilter" prefers using subtle guilt trips or covert shaming tactics to get her way. Combinations of "The Pusher" and "The Guilter" are quite common, as many guilters will switch to using overt browbeating and nagging if they are not getting the result they desire by their preferred methods.

As with "The Pusher", many men who end up in relationships with "The Guilter" will elect to leave the relationship. At this point, "The Guilter" will often transition back into her previous sexual strategy, or will utilize her children as targets in lieu of a partner. The author links both of "The Hausfrau" variants to dissatisfaction with a relationship or life circumstances.

The Anti-Girl Strategies

The Anti-Girl strategies all seek to manipulate the performance burden, scarcity and investment costs in the Sexual market place. The Anti-Girly and Anti-Beauty seek to manipulate the scarcity variable to some degree, with an addition of the investment costs variable. The Guy's girl focuses on investment cost and performance burden and the Low-Investment Chick seeks to utilize investment costs and sunk costs.

The Anti-girly

Both of the "anti-girly" strategies seek to reject nurturing in favor of intellect and spirituality in order to adopt a new trait that increases their perceived scarcity in the market. The Brainy Girl adopts intellect as her weapon, seeking to carve out a niche for herself, often among highly intellectual men who experience high scarcity of women with equivalent intellects. The New Age Chick seeks to carve out a niche for herself among men who are either spiritual or creative or among men who seek a break from their traditional roles.

"Brainy Girl"

Archetype: The Anti-Girl

Category: Anti Girly

Main focus: Intellectual performance, her own interests

Pop Culture Example: Alex from "Modern Family"

"The Brainy girl" is a girl focused on her own interests and very much caught up in her own world. This is not so much a sexual strategy of its own as it is a type of woman who focuses very strongly on her intellectual performance and as a result often neglects enacting a sexual strategy at all. The model proposes a similar route to attraction as for "The Gamer Girl": shared intellectual interests.

The Brainy Girl variant is somewhat of a "Switch Hitter" when it comes to her demographic, as the variant goes either for high status males, attempting to endear herself as an advisor, or for highly intellectual men, who she perceives as higher status than herself based on their intellect.

"The New Age Chick"

Archetype: The Anti-Girl

Category: Anti Girly

Main focus: Spiritual interests, New Age, "Out there"

Pop Culture Example: Dharma from "Dharma & Greg"

Where "The Brainy Girl" is focused on intellectual pursuits, "The New Age Chick" is focused on the spiritual. She is portrayed as the hippie girl with crystals in her hair, wearing homemade deodorant and who sees bodily grooming as oppressing nature. This strategy targets men who seek spiritual enlightenment, and who are attracted to the esoteric and unpredictable nature of the "New Age Chick". You may often see this variant in combination with "Sexual Girl" and occasionally with the "All Beauty" variant.

This girl marches to the beat of her own drum, and will target either men who are overly uptight by challenging their values and static nature, or men who fall into the "New Age" category themselves.

Anti-Beauty

Both of the Anti-beauty strategies seek to undermine the male esthetic preference to some degree. The "No Beauty" type does so by reducing her own sexual market value to such an extreme level that just about every male will optimize her hypergamic needs. The "Everything is beauty" seeks to manipulate the competition into reducing their sexual market value thus, making her appear more scarce than she actually is.

"The No Beauty"

Archetype: The Anti-Girl

Category: Alt Chick

Main focus: Rejects beauty standards, believes there is no beauty.

Pop Culture Example: Carrie from "Carrie"

The "No Beauty" archetype rejects the beauty standards of society, and seeks to either change them or reject them outright. This is often demonstrated in her complete disregard for esthetics. Often her strategy seeks to target men who are rather desperate, and she does this through setting the bar extremely low for herself. Some men are attracted to her as a "fixer upper" in that she may be a woman who would be attractive if she put in minimal effort.

In the variant with "The New Age Chick", she seeks to have men accept her for her "inner beauty" rather than for an externally pleasing visage. In the variant combination with "The Brainy Girl", she seeks to have men be attracted to her based on her intellectual qualities rather than her appearance. In a sense, this strategy bases itself on men perceiving her as "Low hanging fruit" and as a result frequently attracts men who have self-esteem issues, or are low-SMV.

"Everything is Beauty"

Archetype: The Anti-Girl

Category: Alt Chick

Main focus: Rejects beauty standards, believes everything is beautiful

Pop Culture Example: Lady Gaga

This strategy is probably the most contradictory strategy in the entire model. Where "No beauty" rejects the concept of beauty, the "Everything is beauty" strategy presents everything as beautiful. The author compares this to the claim that "over 80% of drivers think they are above average drivers": describing everyone as exceptional makes the ranking less informative.

This variant often attracts the same men as the "No beauty" strategy, but unlike the "No beauty" strategy, the "Everything is beautiful" strategy is often enacted by women who are quite stunning. Thus while remaining attractive themselves; they seek to reduce the attractiveness of other women and men by encouraging them to adopt unwittingly the "No beauty" strategy.

The cornerstone principle is to exploit the contrast effect to appear more beautiful, while also appearing to be a highly tolerant and accepting person.

The Guy's Girl

The Guy's girl strategies seek to reduce a partner’s expected effort and investment by adopting traits the author regards as masculine. In doing so, they are seeking to target a demographic that either dislikes "typical female behavior" or someone who dislikes having to adopt his interests to cater to a partner. Their statement is "You would not have to change at all to be with me"

"The Best Buddy"

Archetype: The Anti-Girl

Category: The Cool Chick

Main focus: Rejects female behavior patterns and interaction styles

Pop Culture Example: Vasquez from "Aliens"

"The Best Buddy" variant rejects female behavior patterns and seeks to adopt male ones. They often define themselves as opposed to the typical female behavior such as gossip, and appearance. Instead they focus on being "The chick you can take to the strip club for beers" this is often adopted in order to gain entry to a male group, where her target is a member, and her target demographic are often high status males, that have typical male interests.

Rather than attempting to be a complementary partner to her beau, she seeks to be his best friend first, yet often finds herself in the friend zone. She can be a valuable asset in your male group, as she will readily and happily point out the female sexual strategies enacted by women seeking to seize one of the males in the group. However, she will most likely also damage group cohesion, as the less dominant members are likely to fall for her owing to little more than availability bias.

"The Gamer Girl"

Archetype: The Anti-Girl

Category: The Cool Chick

Main-focus: Rejects female interests in favor of male interests.

Pop Culture Example: Kate from "Hackers"

Where "The Best Buddy" adopts male behavioral patterns, yet may often maintain her own interests, the Gamer Girl often retains female behavioral patterns, but adopts male interests. This is often to seek out a sexual market niche where there is less competition, thus avoiding the contrast effect, while utilizing shared interests in order to get close to her target demographic.

While there is considerable overlap between "The Best Buddy" and "The Gamer Girl" and the strategies are very similar, you will frequently see "The Gamer Girl" utilizing female behavior patterns in a classically male space, whereas "The Best Buddy" will frequently engage in female interests on the outside of the male space.

The Low Investment Chicks

Both of the low investment strategies seek to manipulate the male performance burden in order to secure a mate. The Slut seeks to reduce the performance burden to get sex and once the male is hooked, increase the burden slowly as in the story of the frog being boiled alive. Whereas the Cool Chick may have a higher initial investment cost, but is presenting an offer where the ongoing cost of a relationship would be minimal.

"The Slut"

Archetype: The Anti-Girl

Category: The low cost chick

Main-focus: Low initial investment for a relationship

Pop Culture Example: Samantha from "Sex and the City"

The slut is a variant on the "anti-girl" strategy, which seeks to utilize low-investment as the chief strategy, often supported by "The Sexual Girl" and "The Fashionista" as secondary strategies. This strategy has as a goal to compete in the market through requiring a low initial investment cost. The addition of "The Fashionista" and "The Sexual Girl" results in a sweeter deal for the potential target as they feel like they are getting a high quality product for a much lower than anticipated investment.

The variant that contrasts "The Slut" variant's low initial investment cost, is "The Cool Chick", that instead of utilizing a low initial investment cost is focused on a low running maintenance cost for a relationship. The author describes combinations of the two in the context of Tinder and "Netflix and Chill"

"The Cool Chick"

Archetype: The Anti-Girl

Category: The low cost chick

Main-focus: Low maintenance in relationship

Pop Culture Example: Robin from "How I met your Mother"

Where "The Slut" requires low initial investment for sex, "The Cool Chick" is running a strategy based on appearing very low maintenance in a relationship. This is usually done by adopting some traits from "The Best Buddy" and "The Gamer Girl" to create the illusion that you will have to give up very little in order to be in a relationship with her. After all, if you behave in much the same manner and like mostly the same things, then you do not have to give up anything, and you can keep living as you used to.

The model predicts hidden costs if this low-maintenance persona later gives way to a Hausfrau variant. It interprets the change as an attempt to use a partner’s sunk investment to keep the relationship going. Changed expectations alone, however, do not establish that the earlier behavior was a deception.

The taxonomy treats these categories as overlapping signals of attraction and expectations. The author connects them to pick-up artists’ term "bitch shield", interpreting rejection as part of a dating strategy. For understanding a particular relationship, a person’s stated wishes and observed behavior provide firmer evidence than assigning a hidden motive from an archetype.